A Wonderful Trip To The Cinema, aka Go See This Film!!!!!

Posted by Lou. The time is 10.59pm here in London, UK.


It was with a sense of real trepidation I went to the cinema tonight to see The Time Traveller's Wife. I love the book - love the book - and from the preview sneak-peeks believe them to have it fundamentally wrong. (It's not a fucking fairytale! It's a serious romance!) So how did I come to have such a wonderful cinematic experience? Could I have been totally wrong about it?! Well, I don't know yet. It was sold-out so I ended up going to Julie and Julia, and fuck is it brilliant. A film inspired by women, made by women, for women. Thank you thank you thank you!

The film is by comic genius Nora Ephron, who gave us the sublime When Harry Met Sally and the fucking piss-poor The Holiday with Sleepless in Seattle somewhere in between. She also wrote a wonderful and hilarious novel about food and heartbreak back in the early '80s called Heartburn*, and here returns to food taking on two books about female cooks in two different time periods and rolling them into one. Back in late-'40s/ early-'50s Paris wife-of-civil-servant Julia Child (Meryl Streep) discovers a love for fine French food, and sets about becoming a chef. In early-00s Queens civil-servant Julie Powell (Amy Adams) challenges herself to blog a 365-day 524-recipe frenzy of cooking her way through Julia's famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking recipe book. It is funny, heart-warming, and an absolute delight for food-lovers.

The performances are great - everybody is funny, everybody is likeable, and Streep is gloriously positioned on the precipice of satire, pulling in a wonderfully eccentric bit of acting. The characters are well-drawn and I just loved that it focussed on two women who - with the support of the men in their lives - seek a further sense of self-fulfilment in life. An all-too-rare thing for in cinema these days. Another all-too-rare element is that Streep is an actress in her late-50s playing a women in her 40s, opposite an actor in his 40s playing a man in his 50s - another role reversal from the typical Hollywood young-woman-playing-partner-to-much-older-man scenario. Better yet, they look like normal 40-and-50-somethings and yet are depicted as having a passionate love-life! Hallelujah!

Please go see this - give them your box office dollar to encourage more woman-woman-woman films (whether or not you are a woman yourself, of course). Take men with you - it's a film for all lovers of great characters and scrumptious food. You won't regret it as this is one helluva feel-good film that will leave you buzzing.

Bon appetit!


-----
*interesting side story - I just went on wiki to check when Heartburn dates from and it mentions how her ex-husband - the cheating, scuzzy, lying bastard who inspired Heartburn - had been one of the journalists covering Watergate, and thus Ephron herself was one of only a handful of people who knew the identity of Deep Throat. After he fucked her over she very openly would tell people - sometimes a room of 500 people - who Deep Throat was, but it was never picked up or reported. (And it was, of course, the correct person, as verified when he revealed himself in 2005.)